Running a railway is hard enough when the tracks stay where you left them. Along Transnet's central corridor, the strategic route threading Gauteng, the Free State and North West that carries much of the country's freight, that is no longer a given. The state freight group has gone to tender for a twelve-month contract to protect the line, and the shopping list reads like a small private army.
Nine hits a day
Transnet's own network statement records 866 security incidents on the corridor in the third quarter of its 2025/26 year, an average of nine every day. The targets are cable, copper and the trackside signalling gear that keeps trains moving, with theft and vandalism concentrated on the Pendoring to Ogies stretch and between Ulundi and Richards Bay. Crews also strip overhead track equipment and perway parts such as rail fastenings and wooden sleepers, and staff face outright robberies. In the group's own words, relentless attacks on personnel and business-critical infrastructure have caused operational disruptions whose frequency has climbed in recent years, now spilling into the rest of Transnet's value chain. The problem is not this corridor's alone: its container route averages three cable-theft incidents a day and its Cape route two.
A small army for the tracks
To push back, Transnet wants more than 1,000 security guards, close to 100 vehicles, a fleet of crime-prevention motorcycles, K9 dogs and water-resistant drones. The providers will mix physical guarding with armed response teams and targeted action against the organised syndicates feeding the illicit copper market. The stakes justify the spend. Transnet describes the corridor as a strategic through-passage feeding its other routes, central to its core business of moving commodities for export, regional and domestic markets. It carries chrome, coal, iron ore and manganese, and forms the north-south spine to landlocked Botswana via the Mafikeng to Krugersdorp and Vryburg lines.
The urgency is commercial as much as criminal. Transnet is opening its network to private operators, having signed rail access agreements with 11 train companies in May, and a corridor bleeding copper is a hard thing to sell.
